S3QL supports Amazon S3 as well as arbitrary SFTP servers and effectively provides you with a hard disk of dynamic, infinite capacity that can be accessed from any computer with internet access.

S3QL is providing a standard, full featured UNIX file system that is conceptually indistinguishable from any local file system. Furthermore, S3QL has additional features like compression, encryption, data de-duplication, immutable trees and snapshotting which make it especially suitable for online backup and archival.

S3QL is designed to favor simplicity and elegance over performance and feature-creep. Care has been taken to make the source code as readable and serviceable as possible. Solid error detection and error handling have been included from the very first line, and S3QL comes with extensive automated test cases for all its components.

Before a file system can be mounted, the backend which will hold the data has to be initialized. This is done with the mkfs.s3ql command. Here we are using the Amazon S3 backend, and nikratio-s3ql-bucket is the S3 bucket in which the file system will be stored.

mkfs.s3ql s3://nikratio-s3ql-bucket

To mount the S3QL file system stored in the S3 bucket nikratio_s3ql_bucket in the directory /mnt/s3ql, enter:

mount.s3ql s3://nikratio-s3ql-bucket /mnt/s3ql

Now you can instruct your favorite backup program to run a backup into the directory /mnt/s3ql and the data will be stored an Amazon S3. When you are done, the file system has to be unmounted with